Claire's Head (20 page)

Claire opened her eyes. He pointed to her bra and asked her to remove this, then to lie on her stomach. She surrendered to his requests, lay down, head turned to the right, cheek to the sheet, facing the empty fireplace across the room. It was all very strange but she tried not to think too much about the oddness. She floated. It was strange to be almost naked in front of this man but she did not feel violated. She did not know what Stefan would think when she told him about this – if she told him
about this. Maybe Rachel had not spoken to her of Ariel because she did not think Claire would want to undergo such an experience. Sometimes the healer laid his hands on her and sometimes he didn't. His touch could be a fleck, an adjustment, a vibrating manipulation. The points that he touched on her body and her scalp were all piercingly tender. Her hands grew very warm. This, without him touching them. Her body began to vibrate – it simply happened, there was no volition involved. “Breathe,” he instructed her, nearly shouting, “breathe.”

At one point she began to cry. She could not stop herself. She shuddered. She was frightened by her vulnerability, by what was being called up out of her. “You must stop being so frightened,” Ariel shouted. “Welcome the spirit.”

Something happened, she would tell Stefan later, even if she could not have said what. Some kind of energetic exchange. She was convinced of this much. Whatever the experience was, it was not nothing. In the moments in which Claire was most exposed to Ariel, she opened herself to an intense physical trust. The world opened. She opened. At the same time, she wanted to resist him, to make of her body a tougher membrane not a thinner one, and grew almost angry.

He spoke to her as he worked although she couldn't altogether remember or make sense of what he was saying. Partly it was his accent. At one point, he asked her how she was feeling and she said fine, now, and if he meant generally then good except that, like Rachel, she got a lot of migraines. He asked her to turn over, onto her back. He laid one hand on her chest, on top of her collarbone, between her breasts, and peered down at her. “You must ask, ‘What is the place of pain?' ” Those were his
exact words. He did not say, what does the pain mean, or, what do you think is the source of the pain. His phrasing was odd. She wondered if he used this phrase with others, if it was a characteristic of his non-native English, or if it was a phrase chosen specifically for her. He did not know (she had not told him) that she was a cartographer.

Afterwards, warm and exhausted, Claire was wrung out in the way you are after going through something inexplicably fraught, yet her body felt simultaneously full and limber. Embarrassed, her cheeks still flushed, she dressed and sat re-collecting herself, hugging her knees to her chest (maybe she
had
been helped), while Ariel, cross-legged at the low table, surrounded by small brown bottles, nursed the remains of his tea. Perhaps an hour had passed. He said she should begin right away to notice some difference.

“With the headaches?”

“All of you.”

(The difference she noticed was not one she would have predicted.

For days afterwards, people, men in particular, would come up to her in public places and begin to talk about themselves. That night, in a restaurant on Spuistraat, a red-haired Dutch-Canadian doctor, seated alone at the table next to Claire, launched with almost no warning (what was the precipitating comment – something about travel, their shared country, being far from home?), into the story of how he'd once been captured by Zairian rebels and forced in front of a dummy firing squad. He was, she realized, a missionary doctor. Something evangelical. Soon after the faux execution, he was commanded to operate on the wounded
rebel leader, an order which provoked a great struggle in him, perhaps the most acute of his life, so deep as to shake his sense of faith, since the idea of aiding those who'd captured him repelled him, while the Hippocratic oath compelled him to do so. He surrendered to God's will. He saved the man, who then helped spirit the doctor and his colleagues to safety. The doctor looked at Claire in puzzlement and said he had not talked about this episode in years and had no idea what made him speak of it now; then his expression turned to something closer to humiliation, as if his confession, his lurch into self-exposure were all Claire's doing. She remained astonished, past the point when he paid his bill, without addressing her again, and left.

Then there was the Indian man the next day in the coffee bar at Schiphol, who, with no coaxing, launched with effusive mania into a paean to the wonders of his patented electric bug zapper, regaling her with his dream of making his bug zapper the number one choice of all Indian households within the year, so enthused, so ardent in his mission that Claire was convinced, unless she made a run for it (she made a run for it), he would never stop.

And the man —)

Of course, Ariel went on, he did not like to work on someone just once. It left so much undone. Regularly his sessions cost $150 US. Claire should think about coming back. To New York. It was not so far from Toronto. In the meantime, regular doctors would not be necessary now that she had begun to work with him.

“Rachel didn't say anything when she was here about not getting in touch with anyone. You didn't –”

“No. I believe there is a reason for her silence. She is on a journey, but if you see her, tell her we need to continue our work together. It is very important, for the sake of her health.”

Well, maybe, Claire thought. “She didn't say anything about what else she was doing in Amsterdam or where she was going afterwards? She was supposed to fly back on March 23 and she didn't.”

“In March she was very tired. I say to her, rest, let the body and spirit recover, but she says she cannot. I tell her about a woman I know in Italy. She does very good work, with her hands. I tell her, Rachel, you are here in Europe, go to see her. I did not think she listened, but I have talked to my angels and now I think she went there.”

“Went where —?”

“Hannah di Castro.” The buzzer rang. “Her work will be good for you, also. At Terme di Saturnia. Near Grosseto. You take the train to Grosseto. Someone will show you the road.”

A
fter a lunch of chicken baguette, Claire tried calling Stefan from a public phone near the Nieuwmarkt, but at a little after eight in the morning in Toronto, he must have been somewhere between home and work because she couldn't reach him at either number. Neither of them had a cellphone, nor had ever yet seen the need to own one. She found an Internet café and looked up the Terme di Saturnia on-line. It appeared to be a spa, a resort hotel known for its healing waters, in southern Tuscany, northwest of Rome, not far from the coast and Isola d'Elba. Not the sort of place she would have predicted that Ariel would recommend, but at this distance, and given her limited knowledge of him or the place, she was without the proper means to judge. She wrote down the Terme's phone number.

She kept testing, internally, to see how she felt: did anything seem deeply different?

Back in her hotel room, she called the Terme, where the phone was answered by a young man who seemed to speak
fluent English. She said she was looking for a Hannah di Castro and wished to speak to her. The young man put her on hold and when he returned said that Hannah was not available but he could leave a message for her. What kind of work does Hannah do? A kind of hydrotherapy. Hannah is amazing, fantastical. The spa was expensive, but had space for her this weekend, if she wanted.

She called Charlie Gorjup in Toronto.

“Hey, Claire, how's it going over there?”

“Charlie, I have another lead. In Italy. Would you kill me if I took another couple of days?”

“It's getting a little hard, Claire. Staff-wise, we're cut to the bone.”

“I'm not asking for paid days. I know I'm a little behind on the wetlands survey but I'll work around the clock, I promise, as soon as I get home.”

Why did she feel the need to keep searching for Rachel? She could just turn around and head back to Toronto. Only there was something she needed to discover, not simply by looking for Rachel but by following in her footsteps.

She tried Stefan again. This time, according to his lab-mate Maria, he was in with the mice. Suited head-to-toe in white, he would be behind an airlock, in what was known as the dirty room, where the researchers handled the genetically altered mice, and which was distinguished from the clean room, where the mice lived and were bred, and which only the mouse attendants were allowed to enter. He'd received her message, Maria said, and knew Claire was trying to reach him. Could she call back in like half an hour?

“How was your session?” he asked when she finally got through to him.

“Odd. Intense.” Hard to explain. “He barely touches you. It's more like tweaks than anything and sometimes not even but something is called up out of you. You respond. It made me cry.” Her still-perplexed face was reflected, along with her gesticulating arm, in a large, gilt-framed mirror on the far side of the room.

“Do you think it helped?” Claire couldn't tell if he was just being polite, or if he really believed that something like this could make a difference. Maybe his questing mind was still taken up with tumours and genetically altered mice.

“Hard to tell yet. My head feels fine. We'll see. He thinks Rachel went to Italy to see this woman he told her about who works at a spa in Tuscany.”

“Claire, you're not thinking of going to Italy.”

“I'm so close.”

“Amsterdam is not all that close to Italy.”

“It's closer than Toronto.”

“I don't see how this helps you figure out where Rachel is now, or why, if she's just bumming around Europe, you need to find her.”

“Maybe there's something in Italy that will help
me.”

She wished she had some access to Rachel's state of mind after her session with Ariel in March. Perhaps Rachel had felt so buoyed, so enlivened by his treatment that she had been more than ready to take his advice, to rest, to seek out Hannah di
Castro. Or perhaps she'd only been more desperate and taken off for Saturnia because she desired to throw herself at anything to get rid of a pain that would not leave her, ready to gamble wildly as you did when you had nothing left to lose, as a young woman in England had done – her agony so deep that she had bought a cordless drill, borrowed some local anesthetic, and, standing in front of her bathroom mirror, drilled a hole in her forehead. Trepanning has a long history as a remedy for headaches (Prince Rupert of the Rhine, cavalry commander to the English King Charles
II
, had a hole drilled in his head by the Duke of York's physician and went on to help found the Hudson's Bay Company) but is not usually recommended as a do-it-yourself activity. Although Laetitia Totter drilled a little too far and punctured the membrane surrounding her brain, she suffered no long-lasting ill effects and in fact claimed to have reduced the chronic pain that plagued her. Claire had passed this story on to Rachel.

In return, Rachel told her about a girl whose migraines were cured by waltzing. Two years ago, Rachel had in fact flown to Vienna to write an article about Therese Krutz, who was fourteen and lived with her mother, her existence nearly reduced to that of an invalid because her headaches were so frequent and severe, until the day that her mother enrolled her in the Feltzer Academy of Therapeutic Waltz. The academy operated like almost any other school of dance: the girls wore dresses and their partners white gloves when they paired up. The school was run by a former doctor who claimed to have stumbled upon the curative powers of waltzing, and indeed the school had a reputation for easing a variety of ailments. Its students were never called patients. In fifty-minute sessions, they did nothing but
waltz to the music of Johann Strauss, Jr. For beginners, instruction was provided. After her first class, Therese began to notice a lessening of her headaches. Over two months of instruction and weekly waltzing, her migraines almost completely vanished, although it seemed that she had to keep waltzing in order to maintain this effect. Rachel had visited the academy and interviewed the director and Therese, as well as doctors who pooh-poohed the waltz's miraculous powers and put Therese's recovery down to the mere increase in physical activity (any sort would have done the trick) plus the simultaneous social life (in particular, the regular contact with young men). Pain is idiosyncratic, Rachel wrote. Perhaps waltzing is a culturally specific response to a culturally specific pain and works only for the Viennese. Yet she had tried waltz lessons herself, three in one week. At the time, Claire had thought Rachel was doing this as research, and as a bit of a lark. Perhaps she was more serious, more drawn to believe in the possibility of such a cure than Claire was giving her credit for. She'd thought, then, that Rachel was coping with her headaches. Perhaps within all of Rachel's assignments (the trips to Budapest, to Morocco) lurked a private, and increasingly frantic, mission to find a cure for herself.